Trump's Top Anti-Voting Guru Wants ICE to Get Involved in Voter Suppression

By Rafi Schwartz  |  January 4, 2018 | 3:20pm
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When the White House announced on Wednesday that President Donald Trump was dissolving the “election integrity” commission he’d set up to bolster his ludicrous claims that millions of people had illegally voted against him in 2016, critics hailed the move as long overdue.

However, the commission’s former vice-chairman, noted voting rights villain Kris Kobach, vowed that its dastardly mission would continue. In fact, he wants the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency to pick up where his efforts left off.

On Wednesday, the White House said it had asked the Department of Homeland Security, which houses ICE, to “determine [the] the next courses of action” for the Trump administration’s bogus voter fraud campaign.

In an interview with Politico, Kobatch said he believes officials with ICE will begin comparing state voter identification records with their own databases of undocumented immigrants in an effort to identify any irregularities.

“It’s the right move,” Kobach said. “It’s a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done.”

Kobach acknowledged that ICE has almost no experience in the larger realm of suspected voter fraud, in which citizenship is often not a factor. However, he insisted, the purpose of his now-defunct commission falls well within the Department of Homeland Security’s broader mission.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Kobach, an immigration ultra-hawk, had been in the running to head up ICE for Trump.

 
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